work. life. open source. diatribes.

Sometimes I get really strange emails from random people asking for Eclipse help. I guess this goes with the domain of being in the open-source world. I can’t always answer all the emails as that’s not really my day-time job, but my rule of thumb is if I can come up with an answer under a minute, I’ll try to respond. Today I actually got an interesting question…

…how do I prevent people from just “dropping bundles” into an Eclipse product installation and having them appear in my product…

In Eclipse, we have something called the update configurator which scans for new bundles and does the magic of installing them when Eclipse boots. It does this because of something called an “update policy.” By default, Eclipse comes with the USER_EXCLUDE policy which simply will install everything located in that location (see the snippet below). There’s another update policy called MANAGED_ONLY which runs Eclipse with the plug-ins specified via the platform.xml… this will effectively “lockdown” your Eclipse application to only what is specified in the platform.xml file (security through obscurity, right ;p?).